Foreign Aid Allocation and Impact: A Sub-National Analysis of Malawi
By Rajlakshmi De Understanding the role of foreign aid in poverty alleviation is one of the central inquiries for development economics. To augment past cross-country studies and randomized evaluations, this project data from Malawi is used in combination with multiple rounds of living standards data to predict the allocation and impact of health aid, water […]
Debunking the Cost-Shifting Myth: An Analysis of Dnamic Price Discrimination in California Hospitals
By Omar Nazzal Cost-shifting, a dynamic form of price discrimination, is a phenomenon in which hospitals shift the burden of decreases in government-sponsored healthcare reimbursement rates to private health insurers. In this paper, I construct a data set spanning 2007 – 2011 that matches financial metrics of California hospitals to hospital- and market-specific characteristics with […]
Policy in Competitive Insurance Markets: Incentivizing Risk Sharing and Cost Efficiency
By Ross Green In the setting of a population with heterogeneous risk of illness, informational asymmetries in a competitive health insurance market can cause the gains from risk sharing to fall short of social optimality in equilibrium. Traditional policies meant to address the under-provision of insurance, like mandating open enrollment or community-rated premiums, can be […]
Integrating Medicare and Medicaid Healthcare Delivery and Reimbursement Policies for Dual Eligible Beneficiaries: A Cost-Efficiency Analysis of Managed Care
By Kan Zhang The extreme underpricing of Chinese Initial Public Offerings in the early days of the Chinese equity markets was reduced by several reforms instituted by the Chinese government from around 2000 to 2002. These reforms reduced 1-day returns on IPOs from 295% to 72%. The reforms reduced IPO underpricing by decreasing the inequality […]
Health Care Utilization and Health Status of NCMS Elderly Enrollees in China: Evidence from CHARLS Data
By Amy Li and Pengpeng Wang This study explores the effect of benefit designs and demographic factors on health care utilization and health status of elderly rural enrollees in the New Cooperative Medical Scheme, a rural health insurance program implemented by the Chinese government in 2003. Using the new data from CHARLS pilot study, we […]
An Assessment of Teach for America Effectiveness and Spillover Effects in North Carolina
By Thomas Burr Teach for America, while a relatively small cog in the grand scheme of education reform in America, has become something of a flashpoint for debate between the educational establishment and a new generation of reformers. In the first part of this research, I add to a growing number of studies on the […]
Possibility of Cost Offset in Expanding Health Insurance Coverage: Using Medical Expenditure Panel Survey 2008
By Catherine Moon The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act aims to substantially reduce the number of the uninsured over time and asserts that the financial burden of extending insurance coverage to the previously uninsured will be offset by the benefit of the attendant improvement in their health. Motivated by this policy, I explore whether […]
How Do Different Parental Beliefs and Parenting behaviors Affect Students’ College Academic Performance?
By Zifan Lin I examine the differences between Asian Americans and Caucasian Americans with respect to parental beliefs, parenting behaviors, and college academic achievement. The results suggest that 1) there is a strong causal effect of study time on college performance, 2) parental strictness and emphasis on education distinguish Asian American students from Caucasian American […]
Neighborhood Effects and School Performance: The Impact of Public Housing Demolitions on Children in North Carolina
By Rebecca Aqostino This study explores how the demolitions of particularly distressed public housing units, through the Home Ownership for People Everywhere (HOPE VI) grants program, have affected academic outcomes for children in adjacent neighborhoods in Durham and Wilmington, North Carolina. I measure neighborhood-level changes and individual effects through regression analysis. All students in demolition […]
The Dynamics of Health Care Demand During an Illness Episode
By David Benson Previous studies assume consumers make medical care choices over large (e.g. yearly) time steps. However, most health expenses occur in the weeks immediately following a shock to health. It is unknown whether demand during an illness episode diers from normal long-run demand. How do consumers make the sequential, dynamic choices to consume […]
